Gorgias Press
Founded in 2001 Gorgias Press is an independent academic publisher of books and journals related to history, languages, and religious studies, with specific areas of expertise in the Ancient Near East, Arabic and Islamic Studies, Archaeology, Biblical Studies, Classics, Early Christianity, Jewish Studies, Linguistics, and Syriac.
Gorgias [GOR-gee-us] Press was originally created by George and Christine Kiraz as a specialty press that could keep up with their research interests. With a background in computational linguistics, George Kiraz envisioned combining cutting-edge technology with humanities research. The new company would be completely online, with no physical storefront, and it would use automation and digital printing technology rather than traditional print runs. With these tools, the press could afford to publish rare and understudied topics that were previously considered unprofitable, and Gorgias soon became known for its pioneering work in language and linguistics, religion, and especially Syriac and Eastern Christianity.
Gorgias’ philosophy of “Publishing for the Sake of Knowledge” rather than profit, attracted a number of new authors, and the press’ areas of interest rapidly began to expand. Today, Gorgias Press publishes 50-60 new titles a year, including monographs, edited volumes, translations, and more, and Gorgias books can be found in academic collections all over the world.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 118
ISBN: 9781463242114
Pub Date: 16 Sep 2020
Description:
In this sixth installment of the long Homily 71, On the Six Days of Creation, Jacob treats the events of the sixth day.Recognized as a saint by both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christians alike, Jacob of Sarug (d. 521) produced many narrative poems that have rarely been translated into English.
Of his reported 760 metrical homilies, only about half survive. Part of a series of fascicles containing the bilingual Syriac-English editions of Saint Jacob of Sarug’s homilies, this volume contains his homilies on the Six Days of Creation. The Syriac text is fully vocalized, and the translation is annotated with a commentary and biblical references. The volume is one of the fascicles of Gorgias Press’s The Metrical Homilies of Mar Jacob of Sarug, which, when complete, will contain all of Jacob’s surviving sermons.In this sixth installment of the long Homily 71, On the Six Days of Creation, Jacob treats the events of the sixth day, the creation of the large beasts and other land animals, and then the creation of man and woman in the persons of Adam and Eve.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 621
ISBN: 9781463241803
Pub Date: 31 Aug 2020
Series: Gorgias Handbooks
Description:
The Gorgias Illustrated Learner's Syriac English, English-Syriac Dictionary is both a convenient academic resource and a door into the world of Modern Literary Syriac. With 13,000 entries drawn from the major existing works, alongside dozens of explanatory boxes on biblical, historical, theological, liturgical, cultural, as well as grammatical topics, and over 80 colored illustrations, it is a practical tool for those that wish to access all but the most specialized Classical Syriac texts.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 250
ISBN: 9781463239817
Pub Date: 31 Aug 2020
Description:
Judean hagiographies are unusual. Some are unexpectedly structured: a saint’s life in the form of a history text. Others offer surprising content.
Expected hagiographic stylizations, for example, often depict moments in which the saint is offered money for a miracle. In such cases the saint invariably refuses. Judean saints, however, accept gratitude willingly – often with cash amounts recorded. The peculiarities of these works have regularly been examined on literary and theological grounds. The monasteries that produced these texts were utterly dominated by the environment of Christian Jerusalem. Although often commented upon, the unmined implications of this reality hold the key to understanding these hagiographies. It is only by examining these monasteries’ ties to – and embeddedness within – their peculiar context that we can perceive the mindset that produced such baffling texts.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 436
ISBN: 9781463241056
Pub Date: 31 Aug 2020
Series: Texts and Studies
Description:
This book is the first-ever edition of the complete palimpsest undertext of Codex Zacynthius (Cambridge, University Library MS Add. 10062), the earliest surviving New Testament commentary manuscript in catena format. It relies on new multispectral images produced by a research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council in 2018.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 1093
ISBN: 9781463241605
Pub Date: 30 Aug 2020
Description:
After the success of the Antioch Bible, this publication is a new, historic edition of the Syriac-English New Testament in a single volume. The English translations of the New Testament Syriac Peshitta along with the Syriac text were carried out by an international team of scholars.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 498
ISBN: 9781463242213
Pub Date: 27 Aug 2020
Series: Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies
Description:
Moshe Bar Kepha was a prolific writer of the ninth century. His writings reflect various aspects of West Syriac theology and ecclesiology, and his literary legacy links the earlier Syriac exegetical tradition (beginning with Ephrem) with the Syriac 'Renaissance' of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. His use of sources crosses Christian confessional boundaries in such a way that his works are tinged with aspects of Syriac exegesis from both East and West Syriac traditions.
In his Commentary on Luke, the Muslim-dominated context in which Moshe lived is clearly evident in the background, and his aim is to fortify the credibility of the Christian faith and the validity of Christian doctrines for his readers.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 226
ISBN: 9781463239503
Pub Date: 31 Jul 2020
Description:
The 3rd century theologian Origen of Alexandria has traditionally been famous for his belief in universal salvation. Yet, Origen is also famous for his insistence on moral autonomy, the fact that God allows each creature to freely choose to move in the direction of good or evil. How can these two beliefs not result in a paradox or logical inconsistency in Origen’s theology, as many contemporary scholars suggest they do?
This book explores the intersection between moral autonomy and God’s foreordained universal salvation in Origen’s writings. Origen was, in fact, aware of the apparent contradiction between these two ideas. He nevertheless stipulated that God can achieve universal salvation without violating a soul’s freedom of choice. God accomplishes this through his foreknowledge of future voluntary possibilities, which God then prearranges into a sequence leading to God’s desired outcome.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 350
ISBN: 9781463207151
Pub Date: 22 Jul 2020
Description:
The expansion of the cult of the goddess Isis throughout the Mediterranean world demonstrates the widespread appeal of Egyptian religion in the Greco-Roman period. In this monograph, Ashby focuses on an oft-neglected population in studies of this phenomenon: Nubian worshipers. Through examination of prayer inscriptions and legal agreements engraved on temple walls, as well as Ptolemaic royal decrees and temple imagery, Ashby sheds new light on the involvement of Nubians in the Egyptian temples of Lower Nubia, and further draws comparisons between Nubian cultic practices and the Meroitic royal funerary cult.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 174
ISBN: 9781463239480
Pub Date: 31 May 2020
Series: Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies
Description:
The theotokias are prayers dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God (Theotokos). In the early fourteenth century, the Patriarch of the Coptic Church, Ibn Qiddis, composed and paraphrased – in Coptic – the Theotokias. His work has only survived in a single manuscript.
This book introduces the author, John Ibn Qiddis, his liturgical, pastoral, and literary activities, and the Coptic language of his time, followed by the texts and an English translation.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 387
ISBN: 9781463241568
Pub Date: 15 May 2020
Series: Perspectives on Hebrew Scriptures and its Contexts
Description:
In 2002 Henry T. Aubin published The Rescue of Jerusalem: The Alliance Between Hebrews and Africans in 701 BC. Aubin, an award winning Canadian journalist, explores Jerusalem’s survival in 701 BCE in the face of an Assyrian invasion of the Levant.
It is unusual for a book in biblical studies to be reconsidered fifteen to twenty years later. The rationale for a book-length collection devoted to Aubin’s The Rescue of Jerusalem is, first of all, the importance of the issues it raises for the academy and beyond. This volume brings together excellent scholars from several fields to consider certain issues that are raised by The Rescue of Jerusalem. This volume is important for another reason. Not only does The Rescue of Jerusalem raise issues regarding what may have happened in 701 BCE; it also probes the causes of changes in Western biblical scholarly attitudes regarding the Twenty-fifth Dynasty’s involvement in those events. Aubin's approach raises important concerns about scholarly attitudes, not only from the past, but also about the ways in which past attitudes have a way of continuing to color later academic discourse when they are not challenged.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9781463205898
Pub Date: 14 May 2020
Series: Surath Kthob
Description:
This volume is part of a series of English translations of the Syriac Peshitta along with the Syriac text carried out by an international team of scholars.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 704
ISBN: 9781463206390
Pub Date: 14 May 2020
Series: Surath Kthob
Description:
This volume is part of a series of English translations of the Syriac Peshitta along with the Syriac text carried out by an international team of scholars.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 300
ISBN: 9781463240752
Pub Date: 06 May 2020
Description:
Many stories and legends about John the son of Zebedee have survived from antiquity. He was known as one of the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ, as the “Beloved Disciple” and author of the Gospel of John, and even as the recipient of the divine revelation in the Apocalypse. Later traditions, such as the Greek Acts of John, told of how John traveled to Ephesus and converted people to Christianity.
John was an important figure to Catholic Christians, to Gnostic Christians, and to Manichaeans. He also found a distinct place among Syriac Christians who preserved their own story about John’s acts in Ephesus. William Wright first introduced the History of John in 1871 using two manuscript witnesses. Since then, more witnesses have been discovered, but little work has been done on this native Syriac apocryphon. The present volume brings together all of the known Syriac witnesses to the History of John with a new translation and includes, for the first time, a critical discussion of the history, provenance, and importance of this text for the study of Syriac Christianity and Christian Apocrypha more generally.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 350
ISBN: 9781463207205
Pub Date: 05 May 2020
Series: Gorgias Handbooks
Description:
This volume deals with One Thousand and One Nights in yet another and novel way as it brings old and new together by exploring parallels and possible origins of its tales, as well as the wealth of modern and contemporary material that it has originated and continues to inspire. The papers included in this volume address the theory and practice of the adaptation and appropriation of One Thousand and One Nights into any type of literary text and media, while approaching a definition of our contemporary knowledge and understanding of the Nights. Through this, it will be possible to underline the dynamic nature and autonomous life that the tale collection acquired and how it originated works like Jorge Luis Borges’s essays, Naguib Mahfouz’s works, Miguel Gomes’s trilogy, a Turkish soap opera that became popular around the world and made it to Netflix, or Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s well-known symphonic suite.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 1093
ISBN: 9781463241919
Pub Date: 30 Apr 2020
Description:
After the success of the Antioch Bible, this publication is a new, historic edition of the Syriac-English New Testament in a single volume. The English translations of the New Testament Syriac Peshitta along with the Syriac text were carried out by an international team of scholars.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 366
ISBN: 9781463241858
Pub Date: 27 Apr 2020
Description:
The essays collected in Revelation and Leadership in the Kingdom of God intend to honor Professor Ian Arthur Fair, a distinguished biblical scholar and leader in Christian education, known for his groundbreaking research on the Book of Revelation and church leadership. Scholarly contributions included in the Festschrift mirror Fair’s own scholarly interests, including biblical studies, with particular attention to the New Testament apocalyptic traditions, philosophy of missions, theology of worship, history of the Restoration movement, and modern theology. The content of the Festschrift thus closely follows Fair's own spiritual and scholarly journey and also reflects the breadth and scope of his influence on the church and the academy.
